See Ray’s art at Lizards Rock, 2395 Greenville Hwy, Brevard 28712

Heart-drama

I’ve been a professional therapist for decades. Originally, I was trained to practice experiential deep-emotional work, but such practices were then largely abandoned by the field of psychology, replaced by insurance-driven cognitive-behavioral “skills,” much easier to research and sell in our Name-Brand society. However, I have been practicing for so long that those old emotionally focused methods have come back into favor, (re) embraced by the cutting-edge thought leaders and scientists of our day.

“The left hemisphere’s goal is to enable us to manipulate things, whereas the goal of the right hemisphere is to relate to things and understand them as a whole.”

Lain Mc Gilchrist, The Divided Brain

in his extraordinary books, Mc Gilchrist considers at great length the creeping dominance of the left hemisphere. Its mode of attention has largely taken over our minds and molded our cultural preconceptions, creating much of the damage we see around us and within us. In the history of psychology our left-leaning, grasping, reductionistic, mechanistic way of perceiving, a useful but inherently delusional aspect of us, has been given many names.

In my recent books Heart-drama: A Way to Beauty and Truth, and Out of Restraints: Inspiration Inside-out and Upside-down, and in my therapeutic work, I call this simply the Abnormal Persona. It pops on our experiential stage in a myriad of disguises, but it is always focused on controlling externals, shaping the world in its image with no real insight or understanding of reality.

The Abnormal Persona taps angry and resentful energies, while it is also interacting with—often it conflicts with or it teams ups with—our Pain and Self-Deception, two other powerful Titans in our nervous system.

My therapeutic work and my visual creations are meant to support standing back from the push and pulls of the unconscious by externalizing these energies as characters, as animals or inner personalities, even landscapes, with the goal to gain increased awareness of them. Once we know what is occurring, we can find strategies to lessen the Heart-drama that brings so much chaos and heartache, so we can better relate to our lives “as a whole.”

Heart-drama: A Way to Beauty and Truth: Holland, Ray, is available on Amazon as paperback or ebook.

Out of Restraints: Inspiration Inside-out and Upside-down

is offered in section on my blog but also free as a download here. This manuscript is a reworking of my method so that you can engage in a self-directed reflection, in the tradition of Carl Jung’s active imagination.

Visual Art

In many of my paintings, a viewer may first recognize that the surface is uniquely intricate. In mixed media, against a backdrop of the acrylic foundation on canvas or board, I cut, punch, and tear decorative papers to add the texture and color. From a distance the scenes can have a realistic depth, yet up close there is a clear layer of oil paint over paper with unexpected patterns, repetitions, and details.

My more recent paintings are oil paint over an acrylic composition.